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Traditionally in German studies the term Trümmerliteratur refers to the literary production after the Second World War characterized by contemporary themes and a simplified, stripped-down style. The keywords of the postwar era were "Kahlschlag," "tabula rasa," and "Stunde Null" as a self-proclaimed "new generation" of authors called for a fresh beginning in the wake of National Socialism. These authors and their works were not always well-received, as demonstrated by Heinrich Böll's now-famous 1952 essay "Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur," in which he seeks to redeem the "first literary attempts" after 1945.1 Today, rubble literature has become nearly synonymous with the network of writers known as Gruppe 47, and with realism, matter-of-fact lyric and prose, and stories set in the devastated cities of Germany. Yet rubble literature was never a generically or formally unified body of work, but rather many different textual responses to the extreme violence of the Second World War and its aftermath. Furthermore, despite the centrality of rubble in discussions of early postwar cultural production, the term itself has remained undertheorized in the scholarship of this period and is too often used interchangeably with ruin.2 Whereas ruins index a legible connection to the past, offering the potential for contemplation and didactic instruction, rubble, I argue, indicates a visible state of destruction located radically in the present.3 The ruin gazer sees a historically embedded object, whereas the witness who describes rubble is still living in the unsettled debris of the recent catastrophe.4 Ruins orient the viewer, suggesting a relationship between past, present, and future (what might be rebuilt), while rubble causes a state of disorientation (what must be cleared away). In his essay "Die Ruine," Georg Simmel makes a similar conceptual distinction between the ruin, an aesthetic whole (ein neues Ganzes), and the "Steinhaufen," or "Formlosigkeit bloßer Materie."5 For Simmel, writing in the aftermath of the First World War, ruins are part of the natural world, whereas destruction caused by humans cannot achieve the same meaningful aesthetic. In a similar vein, Andreas Huyssen goes so far as to suggest that modern postwar destruction does not evoke nostalgia; to be aestheticized, rubble must first be transformed into ruin: "Bombings, after all, are not about producing ruins. They produce rubble."